Gestalt
by Confabulatrix
Summary: True drift compatibility was harder to come by than the mathematical models anticipated. And then came the side effects. Part Two of Apocalypse Vocabulary.


ge·stalt _noun. (psychology)_: a structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts.

...

"_a handshake's a contact sport_"

...

_30 June, 2015_

_Initial test pilot studies indicate marked preference toward, for lack of better terms, pair bonding, citing extreme personal discomfort and anxiety after multiple neural handshakes with more than one test partner. Hybrid-EEG results illustrate marked psycho-physical changes within as few as two "drifts," corroborating test pilot reports. This observer recommends abandoning the plan for a rotating roster in favor of dedicated pilot pairings._

_..._

In retrospect, putting Adam Casey in Brawler Yukon was tantamount to murder.

The technology to analyze a prospective pilot's neural architecture and CORO pattern didn't exist until after his death, but postmortem analyses of his recorded brain activity and psychological profile indicated he wouldn't have made the first cut for laboratory sims, much less the one for what the brass were already calling "Ranger Ready" field tests.

If Caitlin let herself think about it, she'd probably never stop feeling guilty. Sergio would tell her that Casey knew the risks, they'd been briefed beforehand on all the disgusting ways their brains could melt out of their eye sockets, and she'd laugh inappropriately, and Sergio would laugh because he thought the way she laughed was ridiculous, and inevitably they'd fall into bed, or onto the nearest convenient horizontal surface, or against a non-cluttered vertical surface if the first two options were unavailable.

As the grapevine had it, they weren't the only ones, and now that the victory celebrations from Karloff were finally dying down, she was beginning to wonder if that wasn't something they should be more concerned about.

...

True drift compatibility was harder to come by than the mathematical models anticipated. It was almost impossible to make a baseline population estimate based on early recruitment sample sizes, but the applications flooded in after Karloff and Brawler Yukon's debut. Only one in ten of the first round of pilot volunteers had the cortical and neuronal configurations necessary to form a neural handshake in simulations; once the field broadened to include every volunteer in the program, the global average rose to one in three.

As general trends, women were better at holding sustained drifts, shared experiences and values often overrode dissimilar CORO patterns, and similar COROs were enough to form stable drifts regardless of whether the participants had anything in common. Nobody would have picked Helena Sheehan (female, white, American, MIT legacy post-grad, rabid Bruins fan) and Garrett Parker (male, black, Welsh, psychology autodidact, college footballer turned Year 5 maths teacher) for compatible before Schoenfeld's research assistant, Sufjan Harlowe (male, Indian-Canadian, engineering undergrad, Linux snob, tea addict), indexed their files and found their CORO profiles an exact match for his.

Though they'd all signed up for the short-lived J-Sci, they'd never interacted in any kind of meaningful way beyond Garrett asking Sufjan to pass the salt in the cafeteria, once. They didn't dislike each other, they hadn't specifically avoided each other, they simply had nothing in common beyond a shared language, an interest in psychology, and a particular desire not to see the world overrun by Godzillas.

After a month of lab-based drift simulations, all three called out ill, independently of each other, to watch the Stanley Cup Finals. Helena was spotted drinking Darjeeling in the lab. Garrett traded in his iPad for one of the ruggedized PPDC _FortrOS_ tablets. Just after they started the Conn-pod sims in the second month Caitlin got a series of increasingly bewildered texts from Jasper at six in the morning on a Saturday because Sufjan had submitted his resignation from the PPDC with no stated reason as to why, and he wasn't answering his cell.

"Cait, why is your phone?" Sergio complained, groggy and half-asleep.

Her phone chimed again and Caitlin growled into her pillow. "I don't even _know_."

The newest message wasn't from Jasper, but Helena: _That was a wicked shitty trick to pull over on us. Fuck this fucking program, so much._

She squinted at the screen for a minute before she elbowed Sergio and passed the phone off to him and his better vision. He frowned his confusion and looked back to her, equally concerned. _What are we gonna do_, she wondered, and shivered when he answered aloud, "I dunno, Cait."

...

Somebody managed to bring Sufjan back in by Monday, because he was screaming behind the closed door to Juno Keeler's CogSci lab when Caitlin came in at eight. She froze in the door frame to the large room everyone called the Hub, and it was only Sergio's reflexes and the compelling echo of _movemovemove_ in her head that kept him and the stacked trays of full coffee-cups in his hands from colliding with her back. Jasper nodded at her entrance, but every other pair of eyes in the room was focused either on Juno's door or the miserable-looking Helena and Garrett. Helena was hunched over a desk, hoodie pulled down over her face and her hands clasped over the back of her neck. Garret perched on the edge of the desktop with a hand on her shoulder and a defensive look, like he was daring anyone to come any closer.

Caitlin took a breath to ask, "What the hell is going on here?" but only got through the first word when the lab door slammed open and Sufjan stomped out, face darkened with emotion and disheveled in clothes that were clearly not his own. Caitlin didn't recognize the team name on his bright green jersey shirt, but it hung too loosely on Sufjan's lean frame to even be something someone had bought him oversized intentionally.

In a way that would have been cartoonish if it hadn't been so _wrong_, Sufjan raised an accusatory finger at Garrett and said, "_You_."

"Sufjan, look, I'm sor—" Sufjan stepped up into Garrett's space, disconcertingly close, and a few people in the room took a step back; Sufjan didn't ever raise his voice, he wasn't confrontational, he was every ridiculous stereotype of polite Canadians that had ever been made a joke, so it was painful even to watch as he jabbed Garrett in the chest repeatedly with his pointer finger with an anguished, shifting expression.

Helena made a high, pained noise, but didn't lift her head. Garrett said something quiet that Caitlin couldn't hear, and Sufjan shoved him on the desk, stepped back and roared, "_I'm not gay!_" He looked around the lab, teeth bared, and said again, "I'm _not_ fucking gay! I fuck girls, _I'm not gay_, I'M NOT," before he all but ran out one of the side doors.

Juno stepped out of her lab and sagged into the wall by her door frame. She unbuttoned her shirtsleeves at their stark white cuffs, and rolled them up and over her bright sleeve tattoos of pinup girls and Sailor Jerry-styled floral arrays. She took a breath, straightened, and pushed her glasses up her nose. "Well. Does anyone else have anything they want to tell me today, or can we get back to work?"

Across the Hub, on the side closest to Jasper's labs, Tamsin Sevier raised her hand.

"Yes, Tamsin, for the class?"

"I fuck girls, and I am _super_ fucking gay."

Next to her, Stacker Pentecost dropped his face into his hands and groaned sarcastically, if a groan could be called sarcastic. Over his bent head, she pointed down at him in an exaggerated way, shook her head and mouthed, '_Sorry, he didn't know._'

"Fuck you, Tam," Stacker said, voice muffled.

"'d'rather not, have one Pentecost and you've kinda had 'em all, thanks."

Behind Caitlin, Sergio laughed a little helplessly. "That's horrible."

"I don't—?"

"Pentecost had a sister. Had, past tense."

"Jesus."

Juno flicked her eyes heavenward briefly. "Thank you for sharing, Tamsin. Now get your arse in here for your psych screening."

Tamsin tipped a jaunty salute and bounced to her feet with a boxer's grace. She patted Stacker on the back of his head with a "Be good for the nice people, Stacks, can't have 'em gettin' the wrong idea about us now," and sauntered into CogSci behind Juno.

Helena lifted her head at last and tipped her teary face into Garrett's side. "I wanna go home," she said.

Afterwards, Caitlin took Juno out to their favorite local bar's "Glasses 4 Girls With Glasses" drink special and took her time looking over the selection on tap before picking her favorite dark beer. Juno made a thoughtful noise in her throat and ordered four Snowshoes. "Just bring them out at the same time, it's been a hell of a day."

The server looked to Caitlin, but she shook her head. "Nah, just the one for me right now." They were still ironing out all the rules, but so far they had it that on-duty Jaeger pilots were limited to one alcoholic beverage per twenty-four-hours. Considering she and Sergio ran the only Jaeger that existed, at least until the T-90s launched in September, they were always on duty, which was a hideous shame because they'd beaten two kaiju to death in one year and god _damn_ was she owed a major drunk-on like back in undergrad.

"So," Caitlin said as they waited on their drinks, "how'd it go with Commander Sevier today?"

"She tried to bribe me to bump her CORO profile when it came out as a sixty-eight," Juno said. Caitlin frowned for a second before she caught Juno's meaning and laughed. Fresh from another mid-afternoon drift calibration, she felt Sergio echo her laughter, and flipped him the mental bird when he called her a goober.

The server brought out the tray of glasses and laid them out as Caitlin shook her head, still amused at Sevier's antics. "A sixty-eight, though, do we have anyone in that range?"

Juno took a long drink of her first beer. "Not within twenty points either way. I'm not sure we want to. Don't get me wrong, I find her delightful, but she watched Trespasser kill her partner and that shit leaves scars. The humor comes from a place of pain."

"Doesn't everyone's?" Caitlin tipped her beer back and sputtered at the bitterness."Fuck!"

"Yeah, I was wondering when you were going to notice that, you don't drink dark beers, Lightcap-Lightweight."

"Sergio does." She took another sip and twisted her face up.

"I'm sure he does." Juno drained her first glass and moved into the second. "You should know, I'm forwarding a recommendation to the Security Council and Dr. Rosza on the Ethics Committee that we abandon the plan for Jaeger drift rosters."

"Seriously?"

"This morning wasn't the only incident, just the most visible one. The transference between two people is bad enough without adding in a third or fourth." Juno traced circles in the condensation on the side of her glass. "You haven't noticed?"

"Tell me."

"Kalashnikova and Kaidanovsky won't drift with anyone else. I threw Sasha and Duc Jessop in a sim together, their COROs are so close it's not even funny, and Jessop said it was like trying to talk to a concrete wall. They _can_ drift, the connection was good, but she _won't_."

"They did come in together."

"That's not an excuse and you know it."

The server swung by to check in and Caitlin broke her resolve to order a Corona. "With a lime, if you have one."

Juno coughed into her fist, "Philistine."

Caitlin slid her first glass over into Juno's lineup. "Bite me, snob. I am a product of my upbringing."

"Overpriced education and next to no beer budget. Got it."

"Shut your face and drink it."

Juno was smug as she tipped the glass to Caitlin and drank. Caitlin stuffed the lime wedge into her bottle and saluted before taking a sip of her own and considering their problem children.

Sasha and Aleksis had been informed during the enlistment process that there was no guarantee they'd be drift compatible with each other or anyone else, nor any certainty they'd drift only with each other. "A Jaeger needs two pilots," Aleksis had said in response. "We are two, where is the problem?" And now they were the frontrunners for their own T-90.

"So who else?"

"Katja Vogt wants a transfer back to downstairs to K-Sci because she doesn't want to put up with, quote, 'Justin Wentworth's big gay crisis,' and neither Durant nor Kavanaugh want anything to do with him either."

Caitlin frowned. "Wait. Wasn't it Durant who—"

"—had that massive breakup fight with his girlfriend and is now trading regular hand jobs with Corey Kavanaugh? Oh yes."

"I hadn't heard that part." Not officially, anyway. Sergio had heard a rumor, but hadn't asked questions and had gone out of his way not to think about it.

_Ugh. Thanks babe, but really not my type,_ he thought at her. _Also you have really shitty taste in beer._

_ Shh. Girls' night, no boys invited. And I have excellent taste, I am all elegance and refinement all the time._

_ She is beauty, she is grace, SHE IS MISS UNITED STA—_

"So what does Sergio want?"

Caitlin blinked. "What?"

_I'm so alone, so cold, naked as I am in the heart of the Alaskan wilderness. If only I had someone to warm me with her nubile flesh..._

"Jesus, Sergio, it's _June_," Caitlin snapped, only belatedly realizing she'd said it aloud.

Juno studied her with a look of vague concern. "How often are you doing that now, ghosting like that?"

"It's not..." Caitlin sighed. "Don't look at me like that, it's not what you think, most of the time it's not a problem. Sergio is..." She thought for a moment. "He's just bored right now—"

_Bored and horny are two very different things, Cait. _

"—and we did that calibration check today and there's always a little bit of crossover after those, it'll pass."

At least, it had so far. The phenomenon of ghost drifting had been weird enough when they thought it was just residual pattern echo, then in March they'd discovered they were capable of transmitting new information to each other over small distances.

_Do you want me to get rose petals? I can get rose petals. Craaaaaaaaaaap I don't wanna put on _pants_. Why is this so hard?_

_ That's what she said._

_ CAITLIN REGINA LIGHTCAP, YOU DIDN'T._

Caitlin bit her lip to keep from laughing. Juno was less amused. "What if it doesn't?" she asked. "It's a fair question, and this is a completely new field, new technology. What if a point comes where you never stop drifting, never really come out of each other's heads?"

Caitlin shook her head, good humor gone. "I don't know. We'll try to deal with it, I guess?"

"What if you can't, though?" Juno drummed her fingers on the tabletop, looked away, looked back, serious as Caitlin had ever seen her. "A better question: what are you going to do when your swings come back? You've been off your medication for five, six months now? You're bipolar, Caitlin, in case you've forgotten."

She hadn't forgotten. "I _was_ bipolar, Juno. It went away after the first drift, my H-EEGs are stable, I haven't had an episode since November. It's gone."

"How long have you been bipolar?"

Caitlin glowered at her, and answered. "Nine years."

"Okay. Riddle me this: in nine years, how many times did your swings go into remission, and how many times did they come back?" Caitlin said nothing, and Juno slumped back in her chair. "Look. This is all conjecture. You don't know that it won't come back, and I don't know that it will. Maybe the drift can cure bipolar disorder, maybe not. The point is, we don't know anything about what it _can_ do or what it _will_ do in the long term, and _that_, my dear, scares the everloving shit out of me."

Caitlin drained the last of her beer and set it aside. "You never said anything."

"Yeah, well, maybe I should have. I don't know what the drift will do to you in the long term, I don't know what to put on the disclosure forms anymore, but after this morning, I do know that every single one of the drift pairings we've run through successful sims is either fucking, wants to be fucking, or has thought strongly about it, completely disregarding gender or previous sexual preference."

"You mean... _oh shit_."

Juno's nod and answering look of nausea said it all. "I'm not precluding the possibility that we have a statistically-unheard of incidence of un-self-aware bisexuals on our hands, but..." She finished her beer and pulled the next one forward. "I'm getting emails from the Security Council about a pair of identical twins the USAF dredged up, both fighter pilots, and I got a call today about Herc Hansen's younger brother."

"And Sevier and Pentecost want to have a go together." Caitlin winced at her own words. "Not like that, of course."

"Well, if we keep losing drift pairs like we have been, they're going to get the chance. It'll be a miracle if we don't lose Sheehan and Parker, too."

"After this morning, I had the impression we already had," Caitlin said.

"I think if we can bring Harlowe back in, even if just on the J-Tech and R&D side, Sheehan will stay, and Parker will follow her anywhere. What we saw this morning was a complete breakdown in polyamory negotiations." At Caitlin's look, she amended, "Not that they knew that was going on, necessarily, but that's the quick and dirty summary. Throw in the hellish transference they've been riding the last few weeks and voi-fucking-l_à_."

Juno polished off her next glass and freely acknowledged she was feeling no pain, but would be in the morning if she had the last one, so they paid their tabs and took Caitlin's car back to the strip of Anchorage townhouses designated for pilots, hopefuls, and science staff while the facility on Kodiak Island was under construction. Caitlin watched to make sure Juno was safely into her own apartment before returning to the theoretical two-bedroom she shared with Sergio.

He met her at the door, wearing an apron over his bare chest and sweatpants. The smell of garlic and tomato sauce wafted out around him, and he grinned. "I made a lasagne. Thought you might like that better than flowers."

Any other night she would have kissed him and cracked a self-deprecating joke about how remembering to take the cardboard box off between the freezer and the oven didn't count as cooking (Sergio's Sicilian-born mother had taught him to cook, he pronounced ricotta with a long 'o' sound) and he'd complain about leaving out the extra rosemary for her and it would be a delightfully flirty evening before they washed up and went to bed.

Caitlin still wanted to kiss him, wanted to fall into the relationship-shaped habit that had risen so easily and organically from their partnership, and hesitated. There had been mutual attraction before, but somehow she'd never once stopped to think how much of this was them and how much of it was what the drift had made of them.

Sergio's smile wavered. "C'mon, Cait," he said. _Please don't do this, we can still have a good night, just don't._

_ What did you hear?_

_ Enough. _He shrugged and said aloud, "I dunno what you want me to say about it. I was told there'd be risks, and if the worst thing that happens is I turn into your giant robot forever-boy and we don't need cellphones anymore, fine. It's fine."

It wasn't everything he was thinking, but it was enough. Caitlin stepped in and closed the door behind her.

...

In the second week of July, the finalized names for the T-90 series were released: Chernabog Alpha, Ursa Beta, Delta Century and Gamma Garou. Along with the names came the first list of pilots: Kalashnikova and Kaidanovsky, Wentworth and Burns, Durant and Kavanaugh, and Sheehan and Parker.

_I'm a little worried_, Caitlin emailed.

Juno replied, _Same_.

Helena's lack of enthusiasm and Garrett's complete non-reaction to the news could have been attributed to Sufjan's quiet return to J-Tech that same week, but the other shoe didn't drop until the week after that, when Gamma Garou's new pilots strode into Schoenfeld's office and Helena announced, "We're out. I'm knocked up."

The resulting uproar took hours to properly calm down, and even after someone brought a resentful Sufjan in and they shut down the lab for the day, the sniping and accusations continued.

"I've seen the budget we've been given for prophylactics and birth control," Jasper said to the three of them, "I know it's not that we ran out, and I have all of your signatures on multiple forms and waivers, so what happened?"

Helena's shoulders had risen defensively over the course of the afternoon, and her hands jammed deeper into the pockets of her 'BRASS RAT OR BUST' hoodie, so she was in fine sullen-teenager form when she finally snapped, "I _was_ on BC, ya cockmuppet. There were just a few weeks there we didn't know who was driving at the time, and the Pill's hard enough to keep track of when you _know_ you're supposed to be taking it."

Caitlin glanced to Sergio. He lifted his shoulders the slightest bit. _I have_ no idea, _Cait_.

She shook her head and worried at her lower lip. _Bleedover?_ she thought.

_Like that, though?_ Sergio's expression and posture said even more than the echo of his thoughts in the back of her mind. _How did we not notice_, Caitlin translated from the fidgeting cross of his arms and slant of his shoulders.

"What does _that_ mean?" Jasper's voice rose in confused alarm.

Helena raised her hands to make an exasperated gesture. "It means I have some weirdly specific memories of using body parts I don't have and I dunno what shade of brown my kid's gonna be."

Caitlin swallowed hard. "Shit," she murmured.

"S'what I said," Helena replied.

At Helena's side, Sufjan looked ill, and terribly, awfully guilty.

...

Jasper made the final call to suspend all drift testing until further notice. Caitlin co-signed Juno's memo recalling all pilot candidates once it became clear Sheehan, Harlowe and Parker weren't a unique case after all. In point of fact, they were less afflicted by bad blood than most of the other former drift teams; Katja Vogt attempted to stab Justin Wentworth with a drafting compass when Juno called her back up to CogSci, and Duc Jessop showed off his left hook.

With nothing better to do during the hiatus, Helena requested a transfer back to J-Tech, and Garrett followed. For a few tense days, they locked into a tidal orbit around each other and Sufjan, drawing closer and closer. Caitlin and Juno exchanged more than a few worried looks, but no confrontations or altercations occurred, and after Anchorage spent a long weekend on red alert over sea floor movement that ended up being wholly terrestrial in origin, all three of them were spotted sacked out on the sectional couch in the lounge in a full-blown puppy pile. The day after that they took over the couch again, with laptops and manila folders, and seemed to communicate wholly via instant message and winks. It was an abrupt change, and for all that the occasional joke about interventions skipped around the lab, Caitlin didn't think anyone found their new harmony unwelcome.

The email thing was a little weird, though. It was one thing to ghost drift like she and Sergio did; they'd rubbed off on each other, yes, (_and shut up Sergio, what would your mother say about that?)_ but outside Brawler Yukon they'd never had a problem distinguishing which line of thought was hers and which one was his. Some mornings, Helena, Sufjan and Garrett seemed to function as a singular mind, spamming Caitlin's inbox from their separate accounts with emails that couldn't be parsed without each other.

Caitlin knew they were working on something, but what that something was remained a mystery, especially once they claimed the empty LAB-2B across and down the hall from her office at the end of July. On the 30th, she went in early to work on her report for the upcoming teleconference with the UN Security Council and caught Sufjan and Garret _in flagrante_ abducting the sectional from the lounge. The curving corner seemed to be giving them problems; so intent were they on negotiating the angle of the couch where it was wedged in the doorframe of 2B that they didn't notice her until she cleared her throat behind them.

In perfect, alarming unison, they straightened and turned to her and said, "Oh, hey, morning Dr. Lightcap."

Caitlin finally understood why Commander Sevier (and thus Juno, the younger Hansen and half of J-Tech) had taken to calling her and Sergio _the Stepford Fuckers_. She blinked and said, "Good morning, gentlemen. Problems?"

"No," they said together again. Something in her expression must have given her away, because Garrett stepped aside and out of sync. "Nah, mathematically it all works out," he said.

"Isn't that the couch from the lounge, though?"

"Yes," Sufjan said, "but it's rude to fuck on public furniture."

"Jesus!" Garrett exclaimed. "You don't just tell peop—"

"Yes, generally, but nobody honestly wants to sit in—"

Garrett ever-so-gently cut Sufjan off by pressing his hand to Sufjan's mouth with an affectionate and apologetic look. "We did not fuck on the couch, Dr. Lightcap." Sufjan rolled his eyes at Caitlin and poked Garrett in the side. Garrett dropped his hand and wrapped his arm around Sufjan's shoulders instead, to pull him close into his side, and repeated in precise syllables, "There was _no_ fucking on the couch. At all."

_Today_, Sufjan mouthed with a cheeky grin.

Caitlin pressed her lips together and nodded. "That's... fine. Keep the couch, I'm sure nobody will miss it. I'm glad you've worked out your, uh... stuff."

"Bisexual is a thing," Sufjan and Garrett said together. Behind Caitlin, Helena's voice echoed the same, half a second behind theirs, and the door to the bathroom directly across from 2B opened to reveal their third musketeer.

"Bisexual is a thing, it is a thing so hard," Helena said, wiping at her mouth with a grimace. Garrett and Sufjan nodded at the sagacity of the statement as she clambered onto the sectional in the door. "Yo, a little help here, ass-bags, preggers coming through." Sufjan extended his arm to provide support, and Helena dropped a kiss against the corner of his mouth before she scrambled up and over into the lab.

Caitlin studied the adoring expression Garrett gave them both and asked, "That was a topic of debate?"

"It was a thing! It was thing-like in form and manner," Helena shouted from within the lab.

"I am sometimes a slow learner," Sufjan said. "But we have resolved the thing."

"The thing is resolved, and it is _our_ thing," Garrett said.

Caitlin felt fairly confident they were no longer talking about the same thing, and prepared to excuse herself when Helena called again, "Hey, ask her about the thing!"

"Actually, Doctor, if you have a second?" Garrett asked.

Caitlin made a gesture for him to go on. "By all means."

"How does the drift work?"

Caitlin laughed a little in spite of herself. "Oh. Is that all?" At Sufjan's anxious look, she amended, "It's just that it's a hell of a question. You all sat through the seminars and you've been through the sims; if you don't mind my asking, don't you know already?"

"We _know_, we have theories," Garrett said. "But we're missing something. Would you tell us again?"

Caitlin shrugged. "I guess that's fine, I mean–"

In 2B, Helena swore and reappeared at the door. "Hey, so, I gotta pee, either somebody help me over this thing or move it, because I am not doing this every time the nugget makes me puke." Garrett obliged her over the sectional this time, and she pushed past Caitlin into the bathroom at haste.

"I'm almost afraid to ask, but 'nugget?'"

"It's more polite than what she wanted to call it," Sufjan said.

Caitlin considered Helena's use of language thus far in their association and decided she didn't need to know what Helena wanted to call her baby. "You wanted to know about the drift?"

"Yes," Sufjan and Garrett said together again.

"Right," Caitlin sighed. "So which part do you have a question about?"

"It's the neural handshake," Garrett said. "And the sequencing, honestly it's more a question about sequencing and the handshake is kind of peripheral to that, but–"

Sufjan copied Garrett's earlier action and reached up to plant his hand over Garrett's mouth. "More specifically, what we want to know is, what's the difference between the Pons in the lab and the one onboard Brawler Yukon?"

That was... actually a _very_ good question.

...

Jasper agreed it'd be a good idea to shut the lab down early for the weekend, to give everyone the extra time off before Tuesday's call to the UN. Caitlin waved at Sufjan, Helena and Garrett as she passed 2B on her way out and spent the rest of the weekend commuting between her laptop, the tiramisu Sergio put together on Friday morning, and their bedroom. Aside from the parts that involved looking over the simulator programming and editing her notes, it was a lovely weekend, so she was in a remarkably good mood when she went back to the lab on Monday and met an anemically-pale Jasper at the front door.

He was at first too shaken to say anything, but Caitlin understood once he led her through the Hub to CogSci and found the Pons _missing_. "Surveillance for the whole building went down at seven on Friday night, went back up half an hour after that, but there were still periodic outages all weekend." Jasper scrubbed his hands down his face, but the motion did nothing to bring color back to his shell-shocked expression. "All entrances and exits recorded personnel keybadge swipes, unless it happened during one of the times the cameras went down, but the doors are on an auxiliary, _that shouldn't be possible_."

Caitlin looked up at the ceiling to study the layout of cameras and stepped out into the Hub as Jasper went to pieces over how much their missing equipment had cost them and _would_ cost them once the Security Council found out. Eighty million dollars was a lot of money no matter how one looked at it, and it would be horrifying to lose it, but at the same time, if the surveillance had only been down for half an hour... The simulator Pons was _huge_. It was exquisitely heavy, and it would take more than thirty minutes to disassemble it enough to get it out of the building. She knew; she'd been part of the team to put it together.

It _couldn't_ have left the building, therefore it _hadn't_.

Caitlin followed her hunch to 2B's incongruously-closed door. The windows framing the doorframe had all been covered over with newspaper comic strips, and on the door itself hung a copy of Gamma Garou's schematics, with BITE MY SHINY METAL ASS scrawled across the bottom in green highlighter. Light peeked out below the door. She knocked, and Helena opened it. Behind her, framed in by the sectional couch, Sufjan and Garrett sprawled on the floor, surrounded by laptops, schematics, and the disassembled corpse of the Pons.

"Before you say anything, there's something you oughta know," Helena said.

Caitlin considered her words carefully, and decided yelling wasn't the answer. She bit back everything that came to mind and ground out, "Is that so?"

"Yeah, actually," Helena said. "We just saved you from fuckin' killing people."

...

"I'd say 'Stop me if you've heard this before,' but we're all scientists here and we've all absolutely heard this before, so at this point, stop me when you have questions and/or understand how lucky you fucks are not to have pregnancy bladder or worse, because it sucks so hard," Helena said.

Behind her, Garrett paused his drawing on the whiteboard that took up the long wall of the Hub to salute her, and Helena blew a kiss over her shoulder. "Assisting today in this educational seminar," she continued, "are Garrett and Sufjan, henceforth to be referred to as Big Poppa and Hot Lips Harlowe, because we are awful and you should fucking fear us, but we still respect that some of you all here are visual learners." Sufjan looked up from his tablet to wave and Garrett raised his dry erase marker.

_I'd say we've got that fear part down pretty well_, Sergio thought at her.

_Focus, darling,_ Caitlin thought back.

"I love it when you call me Big Poppa," Garrett said.

_Please don't ever call me Big Poppa. Please._

_ Signed, sealed and notarized._

"Right. So. Here goes," Helena said, straightening up to her full, surprisingly-commanding height. In spite of herself, Caitlin too sat up on the loveseat she shared with Sergio and focused her attention forward.

Helena stepped back to the whiteboard to point at Garrett's diagrams. "The way we've been doing things, drift calibration proceeds sequentially: Pilot A and Pilot B plug in, pilot-to-pilot sequence initiates, neural handshake stabilizes." Garrett drew a line between the two hemispheres on the board. "Brain A and Brain B are in full cloudshare mode now, we rev our engines and the neural load drops down and we walk around in our giant metal skin, fun times are had by all. Dr. and Mr. Stepford Fuckers," she sing-songed suddenly, "how is that different from Brawler Yukon's setup?"

Caitlin leaned forward and exhaled hard. "Brawler Yukon was designed for a single pilot, so there's a buffer built in between the pilot's brain and the programming of the Jaeger itself. It's an assistive AI, it's only there to hold some of the neural load. With two pilots it's fairly redundant to have inter-pilot feedback traveling across a buffer to each other and the Jaeger, we don't really need it, so–"

"WRONG," Helena, Garrett and Sufjan shouted together.

"So wrong," Helena repeated. "The sims Pons we ever-so-helpfully turned into scrap for all of you was based on the ones they're building for the T-90's. Hot Lips, how many source lines of code are in Gamma Garou's operating system and firmware?"

"Five hundred and eighty million SLOC, give or take," Sufjan reported dutifully.

"And how many SLOC are onboard Brawler Yukon?"

Sufjan glanced back down at his tablet. "Six hundred and fifty million SLOC."

"Righto. We know you guys threw your giant robot baby together real damn fast, but no way in hell do you have that much room for redundancy. The T-90 OS is streamlined, more functions are put into pilot control, and given only one of us is a mathematician we could be wrong, but how many factors did the neural load jump by with the T-90's? Sing it out Big Poppa."

"The neural load went up by a factor of three point two," Garrett said.

"Awesome." Helena pointed at Jasper. "Dr. Who's-Your-Robot-Daddy, what factor of neural load was our laboratory-based Pons set to tolerate?"

Stone-faced, Jasper said, "Two."

"That's swell!" Helena made a thumbs up sign, then pointed to Juno. "Dr. Roller Derby, you totally know where I'm going with this, right?"

Juno inclined her head the slightest bit, a disturbed look on her face. "You're–"

"Damn straight increased neural load means Brain A and Brain B are leaning on each other substantially more and experiencing more and more drift bleedover than is reasonable or okay!" Helena bent to suck in a dramatic breath, and when she straightened, she cracked a small, watery smile. "We ran the test simulations all weekend, trying to prove ourselves wrong, but it looks like drift partners with closer CORO patterns will experience such extreme bleedover in the current configuration that they won't be able to separate themselves as individuals anymore. It's like jigsaw puzzles, with pieces cut just the same but different pictures printed on them. They fit perfectly but they don't match, you follow? If your test pilots don't stroke out catastrophically in a conn-pod from the neural load, they'll claw each other apart trying to get back into each other's heads outside the drift."

She took another breath. "Like we did."

...

On Tuesday, Caitlin took her seat at the conference table next to Sergio and shuffled her notes into order again while Jasper set up the webcam feeds to the Security Council. Sergio tapped his foot into the side of hers under the table and smiled when she glanced over at him.

_It's gonna be fine, Cait._

_ That's what you said before Karloff._

_ And yet we're all still here._ He winked at her as Dustin Krieger's face appeared on the screen at the head of the table. They made their introductions, the current state of construction on the T-90's was addressed, and soon enough it was Caitlin's turn to talk about the hold-ups with their pilot rosters.

"There was an unforseen problem with the drift technology," she said. The screen panned out to display more of the Council members, and Caitlin almost felt like she was standing in front of her thesis panel again. She dropped her gaze down to her notes for a moment; _redefine load tolerance, upgrade AI/firmware (H Gottlieb?), research P2P networking structure_, and, at the bottom, scribbled in green highlighter and handwriting that wasn't hers, _KEEP CALM AND KICK THE BEAT._

"A problem, Doctor?" Krieger asked.

"There _was_ a problem, sir," Caitlin replied. "We solved it."

...

Notes: For further information on the drift science detailed herein, as well as further theories and metrics developed by our esteemed colleagues Harlowe, Sheehan and Parker and Juno Keeler, feel free to consult the following posts on my Tumblr, filed on my drift meta(phor) page: _Pilot Out of Alignment_ and _Drift Science and Compatibility_. So far as my drift science metaposts go, anything I put out into the ether has open permission to use-at-will. If you like it, feel free to use it! I'm working on another drift tech post, which gawd only knows when that'll drop, but it is definitely coming and it will expound significantly further on the jaegertech discussed in this fic. Keep an eye out for it!

So, so many thanks go to the inimitable hauntedjaeger for all her handholding and post-midnight assists. DAHLING I ADORE YOU. Infinite thanks to all others who offered encouragement and/or candy, I owe you everything.

If you've a moment and have the spoons to leave a review, I would muchly appreciate it! I love feedback, I'm always looking for a way to do better, and I know given how technical this all is that there are things I didn't explain sufficiently. Please tell me how I'm doing? Also, thank you infinitely for reading, I hope you enjoyed it!


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